Select Menus

Select menus

The select menus are driven off native select elements, but the native selects are hidden from view and replaced with more style-friendly markup. The replacement buttons and menus are ARIA-enabled and are keyboard accessible on the desktop as well.

When clicked, if the menu has room it will appear as an overlay listbox, but if there are too many options to fit in the window without scrolling, the page content is wrapped in a div and hidden, and the menu is appended as a whole new page. This lets us take advantage of native scrolling while the menu is in use.

To add a select widget to your page, start with a standard select element populated with a set of option elements. Set the for attribute of the label to match the ID of the select so they are semantically associated. Wrap them in a div with the data-role="fieldcontain" attribute to help visually group it in a longer form.

The framework will find all select elements and automatically enhance them into the custom select menus.

<div data-role="fieldcontain">
	<label for="select-choice-1" class="select">Choose shipping method:</label>
	<select name="select-choice-1" id="select-choice-1">
		<option value="standard">Standard: 7 day</option>
		<option value="rush">Rush: 3 days</option>
		<option value="express">Express: next day</option>
		<option value="overnight">Overnight</option>
	</select>
</div>

If there is a small number of options that will fit on the device's screen, it will appear as a small overlay with a pop transition.

If there is a select menu with too many options to show on the device's screen, the framework will automatically create a new "page" populated with a standard list view that contains all the options. This allows us to use the native scrolling included on the device for moving through a long list. The text inside the label is used as the title for this page.

Data attribute support

You can specify any jQuery Mobile button data- attribute on a select element too.